For the Love of God, Dog, and Obvious Breasts

She's the nun with the earthy eye — England's best popularizer of art since Sir Kenneth Clark. They're America's dog-training monks — laid-back Barbara Woodhouses for the 21st century. If you haven't caught them on PBS, catch the five-tape Sister Wendy's Story of Painting ($99.98, FoxVideo) and the three-tape Raising Your Dog With the Monks of New Skete ($64.95, One Leg Up, 1-888-77SKETE, and in stores). The spiritual messages come with a surprising amount of panting. — Denise Lanctot

Raising Your Dogs with the Monks of New Skete

OPENING LINE: ''How shall we respond to our aloneness?''

WHAT THEY SEE IN DOGS: ''Their presence, I think, does a remarkable amount of good for celibate people. We don't have a spouse to go home to and be affectionate with ... The dogs do provide a kind of emotional richness.''

ON PETTING: Animals ''demand something ... you can give very easily and at hardly any cost.''

WHAT MASTERS LEARN FROM DOGS: ''Dogs draw us out of ourselves; they root us in nature, making us more conscious of the mystery of God.''

PHILOSOPHICAL BONE: Dogs ''have an innate desire to please themselves.''

Sister Wendy's Story of Painting

OPENING LINE: '' ... 20,000 years ago [France] looked quite different.''

WHAT SHE SEES IN ART: ''Light plays upon this whole beautiful body from the long neck right down to the cleave of the buttocks as though [Ingres] sort of licked his paint adoringly over every part of her.''

ON PETTING: ''There's Juno, seducing her own husband with those rather obvious breasts and Jupiter's mooning over her like a besotted salmon.''

WHAT WE LEARN FROM THE MASTERS: ''Adam sprawls there in his naked male glory ... All he can do is lift up a flaccid finger and out of the clouds whirls down the God of power.''

PHILOSOPHICAL BONE: ''Works of art,'' she told Bill Moyers, ''can often teach us things about ourselves we would rather not know.''